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The Church 6: Timothy and Bucklebelt Bible Church ‘Thank you for visiting our church this
morning. We hope that you enjoyed your
time with us and that you will come again,’ said the youth minister of Bucklebelt Bible Church to the
strangely dressed person who had hung around after the service until almost
everyone had left. Then he added, ‘Where
do you normally go to church?’ The stranger, who was dressed in a
simple tunic and sandals, replied with a question, ‘I’m not quite sure what you
mean by ‘go to church’—are we not always the church if we have been baptized
into the body of Christ? As Paul wrote, ‘For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-- Jews or Greeks,
slaves or free-- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12.13). If we are the church, what sense does it make
to say that we ‘go to church’? The youth minister straightened his cap and decided
to evade the question, which struck him as a semantic quibble from a slightly
off-balanced person that w…

The Church 5: Western Christians in a Post-Christian
Culture—Merry Christmas!Introduction: This brief reflection on a major issue
is meant to stir some discussion: I truly hope it brings some change. The larger issue is, “How are Christians to
Live as Christians in a Post-Christian Culture?” In order to offer a crisp reflection on an
otherwise huge topic, I will focus this on the matter of Christmas. And, Merry Christmas to all reading this post this month! The subject of mission
involves, among many other things, an understanding of the Church as a distinct
entity—Christ-focussed—within a larger society that reaches out to that society. A “Christian” holiday gets to the heart of
such a matter. The Present Post-Christian Situation Living in England some years ago, we
were amazed to find children in the local Church
of England primary school who did not know what Easter was about and who
were encouraged to practice Buddhist meditation as an exercise in the classroom
for a religious e…

The
Church 4: Confessing Sin as Congregational TestimonyIntroduction: Ah, confession of sin in the weekly worship service! Here is a division between various forms of
worship in Evangelical churches. Some
churches do, some do not—and who knows why anymore? Here follows my appeal to
reinstitute this practice where it is not present, and to understand one role
it plays in the worship service where it is already practiced: congregational
testimony. I have been a part of a great variety of worship forms over
the years: Assemblies of God, Baptist, Evangelical Free, Presbyterian, Kaley
Heywet, and Anglican in particular. High
Church worship—liturgical worship—and Reformed theology seem quite comfortable
with a confession of sins by the congregation.
Confession of sin is an ancient part of Christian liturgy. Theologically, it fits well with a Reformed
ecclesiology that sees the local church in covenantal terms: that is, as
consisting of “Israel” and the “elect” within Israel: not all in t…